I don’t know about you, but I love a scheduled project. A sketch a day, a quilt block a week, a painting a month… whatever.
Or rather, I like the idea of a scheduled project. I like the idea of me doing one, a bit of pressure (but not too much!), because I do find I work best sometimes with a deadline or a schedule, even a self-imposed one.
But that working better seems to be a one-off. I keep with it for a bit, then inevitably I skip one, then another, then another, and poof, I’ve completely stopped without even realizing it. Sometimes things get in the way, or I’m not feeling it, or the prompt or whatever isn’t doing it for me.
Now with a toddler, I don’t have a ton of time, especially for the more intensive projects I’d like. I did sign up for a ten minute sketch a day in January which, I’m happy to say, I am still sticking with! A ten minute chunk is something I can easily do, even if I forget until the very end of the day. And a one-month project like that is doable with being not too long term.
So I’ve been left trying to think of something that maybe I can do (besides the sketch a day – since that’ll be ending in a few weeks). It can’t just be something I’d do anyway, since that’s not what I need to push myself in. So what would I like to push myself in?
Printmaking has been top of mind, but there’s absolutely no way I can do a print a week. I know I’d start phoning it in, and then stopping probably pretty quickly. Can I do a print a month? Even then, I don’t know. Can I maybe do something a bit different – can I focus on techniques I want to work on/learn instead? Give myself a whole year, pick four techniques, and give myself the whole year to finish four projects with them.
Somehow this seems doable to me, probably because it is very not constrained. I know I just blathered on about constraint being good for me, and deadlines are good, and while that’s true (or has been), perhaps I need to rethink what the idea of a constraint is. A constraint doesn’t have to just be time, it can be a thing (that’s the whole idea behind a prompt. right?).
So maybe I’ll look at a constraint as a technique. I’m going to pick four techniques within the realm of printmaking, since I really want to spend some time with that this year. And then I’ll give myself the whole year to decide which four, and work on the four. Then at the end of the year I’ll have four techniques I wanted to gain more experience in and experiment with. The nice thing is that also gives me leeway to do several smaller projects within a single technique. Something I’ve learned the past three years is that smaller projects are just where I’m at right now. Things that take snippets of time during nap or for the times when she’s occupied with her own experiment with painting and clay and pencils (and whatever else).
Excuse me while I go mull it over some.